If you’ve been trying to market your website with the use of social media, it’s likely that you’ve used both Facebook and Twitter at some point, but the question is, which one is best? This post tackles what they do, how they differ, and how you can use them together to create some awesome social marketing.

The Test

As I’m relatively new to blogging and running social marketing, I decided to put my results under the microscope so, for the past few weeks I’ve been using a program called HootSuite which allows me to manage both my Twitter and Facebook in the same place, as well as track the links I post and see my Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.

Over the past week I’ve posted 3 of my own tutorials to Facebook and Twitter at the same time of day, each with their own trackable ow.ly shortened URLs. What this means is that I can see how many people have clicked on those links since I posted them and where they’ve clicked them from.

I have over 3 times as many twitter followers as I do Facebook fans, so I have the ability to post to vastly more people, but what shocked me the most from my results was that Facebook beat it every time. Here are my results:

On Facebook, averaged from 3 different posts, 15.7 people clicked on the links for every 100 fans I had at the time. On Twitter, those results were only a mere 2.1 people for every 100 followers. Here is the complete set of results, broken down for you to see:As you can see, Facebook wins out each time, but lets delve a little deeper as to why this happens, and why you should still be doing your twitter marketing!

What’s the Difference?

First of all, Twitter is famous for only allowing you 140 characters to write with, which can be a little bit limiting when you’re trying to drive traffic to a post. Facebook, on the other hand, allows you 420 and I usually write a few sentences about my post so that it stands out a little bit more in someone’s news feed and adds a personal touch to my readers. Facebook also posts a small except from your link and a photo to match it, which helps it to stand out more.

You also need to take into consideration the way people use Twitter and Facebook differently. On Facebook, it’s not socially acceptable to tell everyone what you’re having for breakfast or that you don’t like your hair today, whereas you can get away with that on Twitter. The problem with this is that when people are following a lot of people, 20 mindless posts, per person, per day, wash away all the good content like the links that you’re trying to share. By all means, carry on posting on Twitter, but don’t rely on it to help your traffic too much.

Well Then Why Use Twitter?

If you’re using Twitter, then you have to assume that most of what you’re going to be saying is going to be lost in a sea of updates, so if you want to contact someone, then you need to get their attention. I’ve been tweeting for about 2 months now and I’ve found the best way of doing this is to follow people who are in your niche. For example, I’m in the photography niche so I may find other tutorial sites, look at their twitter followers and then follow some of them.

Even if I follow people who don’t follow back, i’m still likely to have gotten their attention and there’s a chance that they would have looked at my website. The real success in following Twitter users is the automated direct message for every new follower, provided by services such as SocialOomph, where I automate a welcome message to them that currently says “Come interact with me and other readers at the Facebook fan page for advice, tutorials and photos. http://ow.ly/5wcyd Enjoy the site, Josh”. That link has sent 92 people to the fan page in the last 10 days, and is a great way of turning someone who will barely see my tweets and turning them into someone who will actually interact with me and others on Facebook.

That auto DM has been sent to 404 people in the last 10 days, and has been clicked on a total of 92 times, meaning that 22.77% of people who receive it, click on it, which is much higher than the conversion rates for my Facebook or Twitter feed links. In the past 10 days, 158 people have liked us on Facebook and I believe that sending a direct and personal message to each person has helped to create a boost in likes that we hadn’t seen in the past. Overall, the whole page is growing very quickly and the bigger it gets, the faster it grows.

So What Do I Do Now?

Well, if you don’t already have a Facebook page of Twitter account, then you need to get one. Once you’ve got more than 25 fans on Facebook, you can claim the page name URL as well, so get to 25 as soon as you can. It’s worth noting that Facebook will recognise capital letters, so even if someone spells the URL in lowercase, it will still use the capital letters, for example mine is /ExpertPhotography. I’ve recently started interacting with my users more and I immediately noticed a big change in the amount of comments and ‘likes’ that I’m receiving. Try and do this early on as people are more likely to join in on an active Facebook fan page.

Here’s some more tips on growing a social following:

1. Post photos on your fan page so that people spend more time on there and interact more.
2. Post questions for your fans, asking them what they’d like you to write about.
3. Write a few sentences when posting to Facebook so that it stands out from the other posts in a persons news feed.
4. Take time to properly write a Twitter update that encourages retweeting.
5. Retweet other people’s posts so that they recognize you and other people see that you’re a human being and not just an automated account.

Hope this helps, as always, you can check out my website here and my other posts on this website here.